One of the problems with being a software developer these days is company Intellectual Property agreements. I understand that companies want to protect the time, money, and expertise that they have invested. But some of the agreements I have seen go way past reasonable concern. Some IP agreements take the position that any programming a… Read More »
In the book Software Exorcism, Bill Blunden described a problem caused by the maintenance programmer not usually being the same person as the programmer who wrote the code. Often the maintenance programmer comes in with a less-than-complete understanding of the original problem or of the design decisions made for this problem. Usually, there are also… Read More »
Perl Testing: A Developer’s Notebook Ian Langworth and chromatic O’Reilly, 2005 This is the first book I have read from the new O’Reilly Developer’s Notebook series. Although the style of these books probably won’t work for every topic, it works particularly well for a book on testing. Each chapter is organized as a set of… Read More »
In the previous four articles in my Unintuitive Multithreading series, I focused mostly on design of a multi-threaded application. This time, I plan to cover a few techniques that I have found helpful in troubleshooting multi-threaded applications. To some extent, the normal techniques you have used for troubleshooting will work in a multi-threaded program. But,… Read More »
Beyond the C++ Standard Library Bjorn Karlsson Addison-Wesley, 2006 If you’ve been programming in C++ in the past few years you’ve probably heard of the Boost library. Boost is a large peer-reviewed set of classes and libraries designed to augment the C++ standard library. Beyond the C++ Standard Library serves as an introduction to some… Read More »
I’ve been seeing a lot of comments in various forums similar to this comment by Christopher Diggins: XML down a slippery slope. In most of them, there is the implied belief that XML is the solution to all problems and that anything that violates the spirit of XML is to be condemned. I have personally… Read More »
Code Reading Diomidis Spinellis Addison-Wesley, 2003 I have had this book on my list of books to read for some time. Although I have been reading code for years, everything I had heard about this book suggested that it would help improve my reading skills. Unfortunately, halfway through the book I was mostly disappointed. This… Read More »
Continuing my exploration of misunderstandings about multi-threading, this essay is about simplicity. If you are interested in the previous essays in this series, they can be found on the series page. This time I plan to start with an assertion that almost everyone will agree with and push it more than most people would. The… Read More »
This essay continues my exploration of misunderstandings about multi-threading. In the first essay of this series, Unintuitive Multithreading: Speed, I explained that multi-threading does not inherently speed up a process. In the second essay Unintuitive Multithreading: Waiting for Performance, I showed how to achieve better performance through waiting. In this essay, I plan to attack… Read More »
The Best Software Writing I Joel Spolsky (editor) Apress, 2005 Despite plenty of examples to the contrary, there is actually some good writing out there on various software subjects. Even though most of what you can read on the subject (on and off the web) is not particularly well-written, there are some gems out there.… Read More »